A claim was made that the RCC held a certain position regarding evolution.
Bricker posted a corrective to the assertion.
Bricker has made no effort to assert any beliefs of his own; he simply provided a factual statement on a point. (Sort of in keeping with the spirit of the Straight Dope.)
It is widely recognized that a number of posters do not agree with the RCC position, but it was not being put forth as Truth and your little comment added nothing to the discussion.
I used to have frequent, and quite pleasant, discussions with an Orthodox Rabbi, a highly respected member of the Jewish community, a Torah scholar, and author of several books on Jewish topics. He would exclaim, in all seriousness, “I love science!” which I took as a challenge.
I would often bring up some scientific topic that seemed to be in conflict with the bible. No matter what it was, he would be able to find biblical references that seemed to support science and convince him that the two were absolutely compatible. Never once was his faith shaken, nor did he turn away from science.
Which brings me back to the OP: some people cannot be convinced that their beliefs are wrong or even dubious, no matter how you try.
Evolution is simply descent with modification from a common ancestor. Cite. It’s a term that describes the overall process by which new variants on species, and completely new species, ultimately emerge.
There is nothing either in the theory of evolution, nor in any observed phenomenon, that would falsify the claim that God created the universe with a set of ordered laws and knew that the inevitable result of those ordered laws would inevitably produce the results that we see before us today. Granted, such an assumption isn’t required by evolution; neither, though, is it inconsistent with evolution.
But you disagree. So please post a citation to the tenet(s) of evolution that you contend are inconsistent with God creating the entire universe and all the physical laws therein, and knowing as He did so that this would be the result.
So far as I can see, by the way, the snide tone I think I detect is unwarranted: I made a factual correction to an assertion about the Catholic Church. Why this statement needs this sort of reply is not clear.
But in the same vein, it’s also a valid statement, in that it describes an explanation not inconsistent with a given theory, and it’s an explanation that is unfalsifiable, much like the God one.
Not precisely. You might discover the existence of gravity by dropping a rock; you don’t lay credit to creating the physical world in which a property of mass is gravity.
I don’t see how God can get credit for randomness unless you can convince me that the absence of physical laws would naturally lead to order. Without the order that God supposedly gave the universe, randomness was all their could be, you would think.
It’s apparently put forth as truth by the Catholic Church. I disagree with you that a nearly universal Myth retold countless times by parent to child for decades is not analogous to the suggestion that adding “God did it” to Evolution somehow supports the existence of a similar Mythological character, and in drawing that analogy, I’ve made my point.
Are you defending Bricker? Are you suggesting that there’s no analogy between Santa and God? Are you suggesting that such an analogy is out of place in a discussion of Evolution, and why Magic isn’t required to make it work? Are you just picking on me?
I gather Bricker can defend himself, and since I know that he didn’t author the position of the Catholic Church, and he can certainly choose whether to subscribe to the Church’s positions or not, I am neither attacking him as author, nor as messenger … my comment was directed to the Church’s concepts re: Evolution.
Are you making a distinction between disagreeing with me and just not wanting to hear an opinion you don’t respect in the middle of a debate that’s going back and forth in a predictable manner? Am I interrupting anyone from piling on Intrinsicvalue? Is comparing Santa to God jerkish IYO because Bricker brought the news, or because the Catholic Church sent it, or because you just don’t like me? Because, it’s not that outlandish an analogy, and it does address whether a Magical “mover” is necessary for a natural explainable process to occur.
No, but if it landed on your foot you might have invented hopping up and down on one foot, and been the grandfather of a billion slapstick routines to follow.
Can the religionists point to any evidence, any at all, that the process is guided by some sensibility or other? Or even that it isn’t entirely random?
Short of that, it’s all a way to try to force a cherished myth into the realm of fact. That’s obviously not the appropriate default assumption, and it needn’t be taken seriously.
Well, we’re getting into the kind of discussion that typically involves freshmen taking philosophy, a bong, and a Friday night with nothing on TV…
…but in the absence of anything, even so much as a single atom matter, or a single stray electron, I would cautiously contend that the concept of randomness is inapplicable.
More rigorously, randomness is simply a set of outcomes such that the occurrence of any given outcome at any given moment is not reliably predictable. But if I shake a pair of dice while a karaoke singer wails in the background, and toss them over a table top covered in green felt, so that they bounce off a slightly elastic rear wall and come to rest with one side each facing up, is that outcome random?
We’d say it is, of course, because it fits that definition I gave above. The chance of appearance of any given face of the die is no more or less likely, we’d say, than any other.
But suppose for the moment we were hyper-aware: we knew in what position we were holding the dice, with what initial velocity we were throwing them, the coefficient of friction of the felt on the table, the elasticity of the table and wall, the viscosity of the air, the influence of the sound waves from the karaoke singer. If we knew all those to eighty decimal places, couldn’t we reliably predict precisely what two faces of the die would end up facing up?
So I’d further advance the opinion that true randomness doesn’t exist. But randomness for our purposes exists, because randomness in which we cannot distinguish or measure the events necessary to predict the result is effectively randomness, from our relative perspective.
I sincerely hope you didn’t take offense at my Santa/ God analogy … nothing about it was directed at you, your post just happened to be the one referring to the Catholic Church’s position. No offense intended by any stretch.
So? Bricker did not offer it as “Truth.” He posted a factual corrective to a somewhat inaccurate description of the RCC’s position.
But my question was “Did you have a point?” It now appears that your “point” was simply to take a personal shot at a position that was not even being offered in the thread.
To the extent that I am questioning the purpose of making snide comments about positions that are not even being offered in the thread, I am defending Bricker and anyone else who chooses to post corrective facts on the Straight Dope.
I am noting that you post was irrelevant, since no one was posting that magic was required to make evolution work.
Then you did a poor job of making that point.
I have made no accusation of jerkishness, but now that you have brought it up: I find it tedious to have posters throw snide comments into discussions attacking positions that have not been offered. When such posts are done snidely, they are liable to derail the thread with personal attacks.
Had Bricker offered the Church’s position as “Truth,” I would have ignored your post. Since you chose to use a factual observation regarding statements, (as opposed to an assertion of truth), as an excuse to insert a mini-rant into the thread, it caught my attention.
That you can (and in fact, often tend to) respond with such equanimity is among the reasons I have so much affection for you as a Doper. Sometimes it bugs me that so many other Dopers can’t see it.
I disagree. Contending, as some creationists do, that God created everything and made everything so that it would evolve is arguing that magic is/was required to make evolution work.
I took SirGalahad’s post as pointing that out, albeit in a somewhat snide manner.
